MobileASR: A resource-aware on-device learning framework for user voice personalization applications on mobile phones

Abstract: We describe a comprehensive methodology for developing user-voice personalized automatic speech recognition (ASR) models by effectively training models on mobile phones, allowing user data and models to be stored and used locally. To achieve this, we propose a resource-aware sub-model-based training approach that considers the RAM, and battery capabilities of mobile phones. By considering the evaluation metric and resource constraints of the mobile phones, we are able to perform efficient training and halt the process accordingly. To simulate real users, we use speakers with various accents. The entire on-device training and evaluation framework was then tested on various mobile phones across brands. We show that fine-tuning the models and selecting the right hyperparameter values is a trade-off between the lowest achievable performance metric, on-device training time, and memory consumption. Overall, our methodology offers a comprehensive solution for developing personalized ASR models while leveraging the capabilities of mobile phones, and balancing the need for accuracy with resource constraints.